Sarah Ball, Founder of Balls2 Media and ‘Chief PiG’ at the People in Glazing Society AKA PiGs, discusses how working together as a sector could be the way of addressing the skills gap.
We all know that there’s a real issue with attracting people into our industry, but could we, or should we be working together to raise its profile?
We all do so much in our local communities to raise the visibility of our businesses, but it’s not transferring to people wanting to work in the industry.
It still makes me smile every time someone say to me that they’re not quite sure how they got into the industry. If I listen back to all the episodes of our PiGs podcast, Two PiGs in a Pod, and it’s nearly everyone!
We know about the ‘usual roles’ we see frequently, but there are so many jobs across the whole glazing supply chain that makes it an interesting and exciting place to work.
Of course, there are schemes where we are looking differently at recruitment within the trades.
Certainly, Building Our Skills has taken a fresh approach through their jobs fairs targeting school and college leavers which is bringing new opportunities to get our sector in front of potential new entrants to it.
But there’s more work needed in training and recognition if we are going to compete against becoming an electrician or plumber.
We are also competing against huge employers, such as McDonalds and Amazon, who offer higher wages. I have heard of more than one factory employer who lost team members when a newly built warehouse offering higher wages opened up close by.
We hear stories from right across the sector about people that have stayed and progressed in our industry for 20, 30, 40 years or even more. Why is that? There must be reasons why they decided to stay put, and we need to find out why, and bottle it up for the next generation.
Yes, younger generations are less likely these days to stay in one job for that long, but if we can keep them for even half of that, give them the opportunities to progress their careers, then we might just be onto a winner.
But it doesn’t just stop there.
It was refreshing to hear Mark Capper of Mencap talking at the recent Glazing Summit about employing people with learning difficulties, without risk to either the person taking the job, or the employer. Could this be a way to get more people into our sector? Maybe. But we need companies willing to try something new.
We all know how good this industry is. So, should we work more closely as a sector to become THE industry where people want to work? I think the answer is a resounding YES!
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